Madam Speaker, can I just begin, just start speaking? I do not have to fill out a form or get permission from an agency or a department or some other authority? Are we not in Canada here? Do we not need to fill out a form or get permission before we make anything, even if it just making a speech? Well, we need permission for everything else and have to wait an awful long time to get it.
According to newly released World Bank data, Canada ranks 36 out of 37 nations for the time it takes to get a building permit. One cannot just go out and build something, create jobs and support one's local economy, one has to wait for the gatekeepers in order to get permission.
One does not have to ask the World Bank that, one could just drive 25 minutes from here and ask Tim Priddle, who runs a lumber mill near Manotick. That lumber mill opened a big warehouse about 40 years ago. Guess how long it took to get approved? One week, one form, one stamped document from an engineer; one and done and away we go. That big, beautiful building is still standing safely to this day.
Tim wanted to build another warehouse with similar dimensions and doing similar things. This time it took six years and 600 thousand dollars' worth of consultant fees, charges and other obstructions. In fact, he had to hire an arborist to write a report on each little poplar tree he cleared, which was actually just useless ditch brush that had never been used for anything before or otherwise and had not been planned to be used for anything else. It took six years, $600,000 and 1,500 pages of paperwork for him to do that, money he could have spent creating real jobs.
He experienced what so many experience in this country: Life behind the gatekeepers. These are the people who are among the fastest-growing industry in the country. They are the bureaucracies, lobbyists, the consulting class, the politicians and the agencies who make their living by stopping other people and charging them excess tolls to do anything positive at all.
In fact, the Liberal government personifies the gatekeeper economy. The very first decision it made on taking office was to veto the privately funded expansion of the Toronto downtown island airport, an expansion that would have allowed Porter airlines, a Canadian company, to buy $2 billion of Bombardier jets and land them there, creating jobs for another Canadian company, but also reducing traffic by landing business people in the business district rather than having to travel between Pearson and downtown, adding to pollution and delay and killing jobs.
In this case, who were the gatekeepers? Of course the competitor airlines that did not want to add convenience to the customers who would go to the downtown airport if this were approved, and of course the wealthy waterfront condo owners, almost all of them millionaires, and by virtue of their wealth having an excessive amount of political power. They killed all the opportunity for the people who would have worked on that project, the customers who would have saved time and the people who now have to sit on the roadways between a distant airport and a downtown destination.
Not far from there are some more gatekeepers in a place called Cabbagetown. This is a well-off community, a leafy neighbourhood with beautiful old Victorian brick houses. Along came an entrepreneur who said that a day care would go well on a street corner in a very large brick building. It had enough space for 80 kids to go to that day care. He was prepared to put all of his own money in it and did not need a cent from the government.
Suddenly, the uber-progressive, wealthy elite Cabbagetowners who were against this construction rose up in protest. One man said, “This is standard-issue capitalism run amok.” This man, it turned out, was a mining executive. Columnist Chris Selley actually called him a “Marxist mining executive”, hilariously.
One can imagine this gentleman trying to get a mine approved if he thinks that a day care is “standard-issue capitalism run amok”, but I guess mines are in someone else's neighbourhood. Another neighbour said that this is a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood. What next, a playground, children laughing? One other person complained about the noise. One lady said that these kids will be walking within two metres of her house, and she signed her submission with “Ph.D.” Quiet, children, there is a genius at work in that house.
Another signatory was a gentleman named Tiff Macklem. He happens to be the governor of the Bank of Canada, who has been lecturing Canadians on the need for taxpayer-funded day cares, the same kind of day cares that he made a submission to the City of Toronto to try to block. This is typical of the progressive left. They want government to block the provision of a service, and then they claim that the government needs to provide that service directly.
However, it is not just day cares, airports and lumber mills. It is more essential than that; it is the houses in which we live. A C.D. Howe report produced recently showed that government barriers add between $230,000 and $600,000 per single detached unit of housing in this country. While the government brags that it is spending $70 billion of taxpayer money on housing, governments are blocking the very construction of that housing.
I want everyone to think about how insane it is that we live in one of the least densely populated nations on planet earth. There are only four Canadians for every square kilometre in this country, and yet we have some of the most expensive real estate. There are more places in Canada where there is no one than there are places where there is anyone, and yet Vancouver is the second and Toronto is the sixth most expensive housing market in the world when we compare median income to median housing price. It is more expensive than New York, more expensive than L.A., more expensive than London, England and more expensive than a tiny island nation called Singapore. All of these places are vastly more populated and even less expensive to live in. Why? It is because while our central bankers print money to goose demand, our local governments block the construction and, therefore, constrain supply. With demand up and supply down, the price rises. It is pretty straightforward.
What are the consequences? It is good for the rich. For those who already own a mansion, they are getting wealthier every day because their house price is going up. They can sit back and have rocking-chair money. Their house makes more than they do. However, for those who are poor and cannot find places to live, like the young people who just told a survey that came out today that one-third of them have totally given up on ever owning a house in their life, those people are out in the cold. In Toronto, a social services organization said that 98% of homeless shelter space is occupied. Over 300,000 people in one city are on a waiting list for subsidized housing. There are 10,000 people in that one city who are homeless.
A lot of people worry about what happened to the homeless in Toronto during this pandemic. In fact, one carpenter took matters into his own hands. Khaleel Seivwright, a carpenter, said that these people are going to freeze to death because they cannot stay in a shelter where they will catch COVID, so they are out on the street. With his bare hands, he built mini-shelters for them. He put in insulation, a smoke detector, a carbon monoxide detector. He said plainly that this was not a solution; it was just something he was doing to save people's lives until we can finally find a way to house people in this, one of the wealthiest countries on planet earth.
What did the city say? It did not say, “We are going to give this guy a hand. Let's give him a round of applause and let's see how we can help him do even better.” No. It did not say, “Boy, this guy is taking action that we should have taken long ago. He is making us look bad. We had better perform better than we have before.” No. It hired lawyers and got an injunction against him.
All of a sudden, the one guy who is selflessly trying to help solve the problem caused by city hall and by the bureaucracy is the villain. How typically this is of the story we see in our country.
Another poverty fighter is Dale Swampy, the head of the National Coalition of Chiefs, which has as its mandate to fight and defeat on-reserve poverty. That is its mission. It came up with a plan to support a brand new natural resource project that would ship western Canadian energy to the coast where it could be delivered to the fast growing and energy hungry markets of Asia, thus breaking the American stranglehold on our energy exports, creating jobs for steelworkers, energy workers, logistics and transportation workers and delivering $2 billion of wages and benefits to indigenous communities. The CEO of the project was going to be an indigenous person, and 31 of the 40 indigenous communities along the route supported it. That is more than 75%.
The environmental agency responsible took a look at it. It spent three years, heard from 1,500 witnesses and read 9,000 letters. It reviewed over 100,000 pages of evidence. It went to 21 different communities. It concluded that the pipeline was safe and in the public interest. However, the Prime Minister took office and he killed the project, denying those first nations communities their constitutional right in the charter to be consulted. He did not consult with any of them. What happened? Those indigenous communities lost the $2 billion. Now we are keeping toll. There will be these green jobs that the government will deliver. I asked Mr. Swampy how many of these green jobs had shown up since the pipeline was killed. It was zero, nada, nothing. In fact, he said that the so-called environmentalists did to him what they did to his father's generation 20 or 30 years ago. They came then and campaigned against hunting, trapping and fishing. Once they were done with their politics and they had won their political battle, they were gone. They left behind impoverished communities with less opportunity than they had before. That was the result.
One of the gatekeepers who comes to mind is Gerald Butts. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars working for the World Wildlife Fund, which is a supposedly an environmental organization. Instead of spending money on the environment, on preserving wetlands and so forth, it was paying him a multi-hundred-thousand dollar severance for quitting his job and coming to work for the government, where he has helped to block pipelines ever since.
We live in a country where we cannot even trade with ourselves. Maybe our friends in the Bloc, who want to create their own separate country, like it that way. I do not know, because we do not even treat our own interprovincial trade the way we treat foreign trade. Someone can be arrested or charged for bringing alcohol across an interprovincial border.
I will quote from our Constitution, “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall...be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” That was promised us back in the time of our Constitution, yet to this day someone can be charged for bringing liquor or maple syrup in from another province. They can be charged for working in construction in the wrong province.
According to Statistics Canada, the effect of these barriers on trade between Canadian provinces works out to a tariff of about 7%. According to the World Trade Organization, the tariff that Canada charges on foreign imports to Canada is 4%. In other words, we charge 7% on goods that travel between provinces and only 4% on goods that come from abroad. If people order something from Alibaba to be delivered to their doorsteps, it is likely tariffed at a significantly lower rate than if they went and bought a product that was made in their neighbouring province. This is economic hara-kiri that we would punish our own businesses with higher tariffs than we would apply to Chinese businesses that sell within Canada.
It raises the question, could we even build the Canadian Pacific Railway today? I am not sure we could. What about our national highway system? Could we build that today? There would be some gatekeeper wanting to block it. If we cannot even transit goods across our borders without some parasitical interest group claiming there needs to be a tariff or regulation keeping it out, why would anybody allow a railway or a highway to be built? Forget transmission lines or pipelines; I am not sure we could get anything done as long as this gatekeeper economy continues to stand in the way.
We forget that there was a time when we got things done in this country. This is the country that discovered and isolated insulin, for God's sake, saving the lives of millions of diabetics. We discovered stem cells, which treat cancer and countless other conditions, and have the promise to repair spinal cords and bring sight to the blind. We created a mechanical arm that can go into outer space and move hundreds of thousands of kilograms of weight with a remote control, the Canadarm.
We conquered Vimy Ridge. We liberated the Dutch. We fought and succeeded at Juno Beach. Of course, that was at a time when if people said they had been triggered, it did not mean they heard a comment that hurt their feelings. It meant they had been shot at by enemies on the battlefield. That was the generation of that time.
We are a country that once had a government that would stand up and lead the world against apartheid. Now we have a government that is too terrified to speak out against the genocide of the Muslim minority in China. We have, today, a country where some people seriously talk about banning local kids' sports organizations from keeping score for fear of hurting the losing team's feelings. This is the country of Paul Henderson, who scored the winning goal in the summit series with less than a minute left to electrify the world and send a signal in favour of freedom and against communism, back in 1972.
One day, I believe we will knock down these gates and remove these gatekeepers altogether, to make Canada a place that is the easiest place on planet Earth in which to build a business, the fastest place to get sign-off to build something, the freest place on Earth in which to do commerce, to buy, sell, work, build, hire, take risks and, yes, to even win.
How about a budget bill like that?
